Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/58

28 played with taste and feeling ; and E.W. Russell, whom we shall meet again. These two with H. Leigh, who was no mean pianist, contributed to the harmony of the evening when music was wished for. Walter Thornbury must not be for- gotten, an excitable, impulsive, careless man, who worked hard at the antique, but in a perfunctory manner, for his mind was occupied while drawing with thoughts of how to turn a phrase or compose a couplet. He soon had the good sense to see that art was not his vocation (he gave six toes to a foot of the Gladiator), and the opportunity offering, he wrote a series of articles on the Courts of the Sydenham Crystal Palace, then in course of completion, for publication in the Athenæum, of which journal he eventually, under the editor- ship of Hep worth Dixon, became art critic. His “Old London was, I believe, fairly successful; less known was a volume of verse, “ Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads,” for which I made some half-dozen illustrations. His “Life of J.M.W. Turner” was carelessly written and failed to make any mark.

I cannot resist breaking off here to relate an experience which, though not intimately connected with my studies in drawing, was not without its influence, in an artistic sense, on my future tastes and proclivities. It made a great impression on